The impacts of leadership in the quality of municipal public services: case study of a portuguese municipal council

[EN]The present research work, based on some of the components of the Common Assessment Framework, sets to analyse the influence held by leadership in specific factors that constitute the organisational climate, and also the impact that these factors have on the quality of municipal public services. For the purposes of this study, we propose Likert’s exploitative autocratic and participative leadership styles to explain the genesis, structure and workflow. As far as the organisational climate is concerned, the variables used are motivation, satisfaction, empowerment, conflict and stress. The main conclusions that arose was that a participative leader confers higher relevance to the quality of service, through motivation, satisfaction, empowerment and human resources positive results, than an exploitative autocratic leader. Performed contributions are based on the empiric research hereby presented, and new research guidelines are proposed. The research methodology used was qualitative, based on the case study.

Systematic liquidity: commonality and inter-temporal variation in the Portuguese stock market

[EN] The aim of this paper is to study systematic liquidity at the Euronext Lisbon Stock Exchange. The motivation for this research is provided by the growing interest in financial literature about stock liquidity and the implications of commonality in liquidity for asset pricing since it could represent a source of non-diversifiable risk. Namely, it is analysed whether there exist common factors that drive the variation in individual stock liquidity and the causes of the inter-temporal variation of aggregate liquidity. Monthly data for the period between January 1988 and December 2011 is used to compute some of the most used proxies for liquidity: bid-ask spreads, turnover rate, trading volume, proportion of zero returns and the illiquidity ratio. Following Chordia et al. (2000) methodology, some evidence of commonality in liquidity is found in the Portuguese stock market when the proportion of zero returns is used as a measure of liquidity. In relation to the factors that drive the inter-temporal variation of the Portuguese stock market liquidity, the results obtained within a VAR framework suggest that changes in real economy activity, monetary policy (proxied by changes in monetary aggregate M1) and stock market returns play an important role as determinants of commonality in liquidity.

European Newspapers’ Digital Transition: New Products and New Audiences

The adaptation of traditional newspapers to new digital media and its interface, far from being a mere technical transformation, has contributed to a gradual change in the media themselves and their audiences. With a sample including the top general information pay newspaper in each of the 28 countries of the European Union, this research has carried out an analysis using 17 indicators divided in 4 categories. The aim is to identify the transformations that the implementation of digital media have brought to the top European newspapers. In general terms, the results show that most dailies have managed to keep their leadership also in online environment. Moreover, an emerging group of global media is growing up, based in preexisting national media. Digital and mobile media have contributed to the appearance of new consumption habits as well, where users read more superficially and sporadically. The audience uses several formats at a time, and digital devices already bring the biggest amount of users to many media. The Internet-created new information windows –search engines, social networks, etc. –are also contributing to the change in professional work routines.